Far from the Hollywood image of a grubby desperado fighting for his life in a lawless arena of horror, the real-life Roman gladiator was a highly trained and pampered professional - rich, famous and pursued by groupies.

New research has poked massive holes in the long-accepted image of gladiators as poor wretches sent to gruesome deaths in front of crowds baying for blood.

Gladiators were in fact provided with the best food and healthcare during their years of training and were given the best medical treatments: they were the football stars of their day, with sponsorship deals and a share of the prize money.

'Much of that film stuff is simply wrong,' said Professor Klaus Grosschmidt of Vienna University. 'The images in Gladiator were faulty, Russell Crowe's kit was all wrong and they were not set up against unbeatable odds. That would not have been a good show for the crowd.

'There were referees in the arenas, and the weapons and protection the fighters had were carefully chosen to ensure a fair fight.'

Grosschmidt has been working with experimental archaeologists from Munich University on remains of gladiators found in Turkey. The dig was at the site of the ancient city of Ephesus.

He is using his medical expertise to extract clues about the daily lives of the gladiators from skeletons nearly 2,000 years old.

'This is the first time nutrition, training and fight injuries can be directly investigated from their bones,' he said.

'The medical attention they received was second to none. The most famous doctor of the times, Galenus, treated gladiators at Ephesus.'

Grosschmidt described how the gladiators were the equivalent of today's football stars, although they had no rights and could be bought and sold at will.

Many gladiators were sentenced by courts to fight, but just as many volunteered for the chance of fame and fortune. They spent at least three years in a training camp, where they ate the best food with a view to developing a layer of fat over their muscles the better to sustain cut wounds.

'These camps were closed - they could not leave of their own free will,' Grosschmidt said. 'But they received female visitors - groupies - often women of good families who would sneak into the camps for assignations. One gravestone even boasted that the dead gladiator was 'the favourite of women in the night'.

'They were famous not only from the fights themselves, but also because they would advertise ahead of the fights in order to encourage people to bet on them.'

Judicious selection of weapons and pairing of fighters were combined with the use of referees to make sure the fights were fair. The gladiators' training included a certain amount of choreographed moves.

'Boxing is really the only comparable sport of today,' Grosschmidt said. 'There were many fights and it was well organised, with a number of short fights one after another, although the crucial difference is that the gladiators were fighting for their lives, making the essence of the fighting very different.'

The audience did have a say in the fate of the loser, who could survive to fight another day if he had put up a good show.

Going to gladiator fights was considered a more intellectual pastime than going to the theatre - the fights promoted principles of honour, bravery and fearlessness in face of death, while plays were merely entertainment.

This principle also applied to the wild animals often used in the spectacles. 'There was even one lion that was buried with a gravestone because it had killed many gladiators and was therefore honoured,' Grosschmidt said.